Robb, J.D.: (27) Salvation in Death

From the library, more light reading, the latest Eve Dallas novel by J.D. Robb, Salvation in Death. A priest drops dead during a funeral Mass, and it turns out that someone’s put cyanide in the sacramental wine.

This turns out to be a type of story that I’d been wanting Robb to write (series spoilers, ROT-13: jurer n zna vf gur bar gb chyy gur ernyyl ybat-enatr pba (pbzcner Fgenatref)), but I’m not convinced by the portrait of the central character, which is what the entire book revolves around. It was probably pushing plausibility anyway, but I felt that Robb threw in one detail too many, which resulted in a muddled and contradictory whole.

Eve and Roarke’s past traumas are also stirred up by events of this book, after taking a back seat for a bit in the series. I’ve sometimes been unsatisfied with how these have been handled in the past, so I should note that I thought it worked pretty well here.

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Wilks, Eileen: (04) Night Season

More light reading/finishing four-book series that I started a while ago, with Eileen Wilks’ Night Season. I’d put off reading this because it focused on Cynna Weaver and I was unhappy with how the last book, Blood Lines, had treated her.

Unfortunately I didn’t think this book was an improvement in that regard, and for some reason—maybe just the sleep deprivation—I slid right off the worldbuilding in this book, too. (It doesn’t help that the book is structured as a Quest for the Plot Token.) So, unless the next book is a dramatic improvement, I suspect I’ll be dropping this series.

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Chase, Loretta: (104) Not Quite a Lady

A little light reading, Loretta Chase’s Not Quite a Lady, fourth and last in her Carsington Brothers series. Lady Charlotte Hayward is beautiful, rich, twenty-seven, and unmarried: a deeply improbable combination that she takes some pains to unobtrusively perpetuate, because she fears the revelation of the fact that she is not a virgin. But Darius Carsington, the scientifically-minded youngest Carsington brother, has taken over management of the property next door and is fascinated by her contradictions.

This is a sweet story of two people finding someone that they can be most fully themselves with. I would rank it probably just below Miss Wonderful; it’s more interesting than Lord Perfect, but the ending strikes me as improbably happy. All the same, it was an enjoyable way to pass a couple of hours and a decent way to round off the series.

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